Taken in our local beach flower gardens. Backlit by my beautiful assissant (my wife) with my reflector. The flower was in total shadow so it was fun to try and get in the right spot with the reflector. We garnered many a strange look from passers by.
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This has become one of my favorites from this challenge. The soft glow of this lens is quite beautiful. The edit is excellent & the dominating bloom is beautiful, (voted this 6) but I also like it as an fine & rare use (at least on dpc) of this difficult, fixed aperture, unusual lens. I noticed the subtle circular bokeh, an interesting characteristic of a mirror lens, while voting, but at the time was not aware of how that could occur. My criticism would be that the crop is too tight, not enough bokeh shown.
Whoops! There it is. Lens information! Sorry for the oversight.
This is a difficult subject to work to throw the background into a soft blur. You couldn't have opened the aperture on this lens more than f/8--even if you could you'd be fighting to keep important elements in the blossom sharp because of the depth of the flower. So, with the equipment at hand it seems the background needed adjusting. More separation between flower and background--a different bloom, a different angle toward a portion of the foliage farther away? Or, as mentioned before, a more dimly lit background--perhaps having your "beautiful assistant" shade it.
Of course, if this challenge weren't under "basic" rules you could just dodge and blur the background in Photo Shop... ;-)
The flower and lighting are lovely! The bee was caught at a nice moment though I wish the wings were better defined. With a shutter speed of 1/800 it's surprising that the wing action isn't better stopped.
There are two main issues I see with this image. First, the center of interest is in the center. This leads the viewer to the bull's eye and there the exploration mostly stops. Second, The detail of the background competes for attention with the texture of the petals and the main interest. It becomes a subject in itself.
For this challenge, "Bokeh," the out of focus background was important. I feel it just has too much going on. With so many interesting lines, light and distinguishable shapes the bokeh does not enhance the subject. You don't say what lens you used, but I find a long lens (around 200 mm) taken from further away with similar settings to yours can help throw the background out a bit more. Another way is to choose a background that is not as well lit as the subject.
Overall, a pleasing subject with great color and lighting that suffers a bit because of composition and background distractions.
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